Tag: Bungalow

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House Tour: Back Bedroom After

Christine

Oh, boy. I am embarrassed to show you all this room. It is baaaaad. But everyone has a junk room, right? Right? Someday I’ll get this organized. Really, I will. If you can believe it, there was twice as much stuff in here about a year ago, so that’s progress. And there is a wide path from the door to the closet on the left, both dressers are accessible, as well as the window on the left. Can’t quite get to the window on the right just now, even though there is a large empty space in front of it. You just can’t get there.

And if you can imagine it, three years ago, pretty much the whole house was in this state. Or worse. So if you look at it like that, we’ve made progress. We’ve just stalled here. This was the landing spot for everything we didn’t know what to do with.

You may notice that this room is slightly less peach than before, but it was supposed to be a lovely light mushroom color. But our less-than-fab painter, who shall go unnamed, decided he’s a one-coat-Joe. So, some day we’ll need to paint in here again. The color isn’t as deep as I had wanted, and because walls are not perfectly smooth, peach paint shows through where the roller skipped over the concave spots. Idiot.

Also, the this is the only room in the house with painted trim. I’m happy with it, I think it looks nice painted a nice white. Really, it was the only way to go here because both windows were later additions, as well as most of the baseboard, so they weren’t chestnut, and it was all already painted, so… I don’t feel bad.

Carpet is another only-in-this-room. Some stupid P.O. had glued carpet down to the floor at some point, and while, maybe, maybe the glue may have come up, it would have cost a fortune and been very labor intensive. Besides, only half of the room had hardwood floor, the other half now has new plywood that replaced the rotten sleeping porch floor.

Another someday we’ll get the walls painted to match the carpet. It’ll look nice with the white trim. The doors themselves were refinished, though, in keeping with the rest of the house.

The closet is reasonably organized……do I at least get points for that?

Okay, so, remember that space behind the door I told you to make note of in the before pictures? Well, here is the final result:That second “cubby” door was built by Bill, and it leads to the plumbing access. That bump out? Well, that is just small space lost in a large room, a small price to pay for much gained elbow room in the bathroom…

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House Tour: Back Bedroom Before

Christine

Oh, my, folks. Here we are, nearly at the end of our house tour, and we find ourselves in the room where it all began. This is the back bedroom. It fills the back dormer of the bungalow. Once upon a time this was a rather small bedroom, with a sleeping porch. Somewhere along the line, a P.O. (a stupid P.O.) enclosed the sleeping porch to make a larger bedroom. Okay idea in theory. In practice, however…

Porch floors are meant to be sloped away from the house, so that rainwater will drain off the floor, much like a roof. Well, this particularly lazy P.O. couldn’t even be bothered to level the floor, or replace what were most likely already rotten floor boards. Nah, let’s just glue cheap office carpet over the whole shebang. And never mind the drop in ceiling height. Doesn’t that look ridiculous? Unfortunately, at this juncture, there is nothing reasonable that I can do to fix this. It would cost an arm and a leg to do what I’d really like to do: recreate the roof over this section so that it blends seamlessly with the rest of the house. Oh, well. Maybe if I win the lottery.

So this section of roof and ceiling is more problematic than just aesthetically displeasing. It had also been leaking for a very, very long time when I got the house. In fact, before Jeff the electrician had put one tiny hole in the wall, this ceiling came a-tumblin‘ down.

I wasn’t even living at the bungalow yet, but stopped in daily to check on progress. One evening, late, I popped in just to see if Jeff had gotten started yet. As I was looking around the upstairs bathroom, I kept hearing this dripping sound. I followed it to the back bedroom, where a great sheet of drywall from the ceiling had come down from the center, almost like it was on a hinge. I couldn’t even comprehend what had happened at first.

As it turns out, my P.O.’s P.O.s had known the roof over this section was bad more than a decade before. My dad and grandfather actually submitted a bid to do the repairs, but when the owners saw the price tag, the balked. Apparently they decided no action was the route to take.

Fast forward to November of 2003. So I see this huge section of drywall hanging onto the ceiling by nothing more than drywall tape at one end, and I hear the sound of dripping water, the carpet is saturated. Then I look up. The insulation is all wet, dripping. And dark. Really dark. Oh my God. Black with mold. Panic. Frantic call to mom, cutting up large trash bags to cover the floor, as if that would protect it. Little did I know, that floor was way beyond saving.

Over the following few weeks, all the rotten and moldy stuff was torn out by Bill, who then replaced the rotten floor with one that is solid and mostly level. It is an old house after all, and while Bill is great, there is only so much one can do in some situations. Bill also tore out all the wet drywall and moldy insulation, swabbed the remaining structure down with Clorox, allowed it to dry, then replaced the insulation and installed blueboard. Many months later the plaster guys gave that blueboard a nice skim coat.

Notice that little door there? Well that leads to a storage cubby under the eaves. The other three eaves are utilized by bedroom closets, but this one is next to the bathroom. It is a pretty cool feature, kids seem to think it is cool, and Oli always insists on following me in there, even though it is a small space.Take note of that dead space behind the door. When we get to the after pictures, you’ll notice a change. And of course, another giant closet, complete with loose, real linoleum.

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House Tour: Side Bedroom After

Christine

Now, here we are in 2008. Not much has changed. The floors were refinished. The chestnut trim stripped and refinished, the grain in this room much darker than most other rooms, due to the purple paint that could not be picked out of every crevice, and therefore had to be dyed to blend in. A new, fancier ceiling fan. The walls were skim-coated to give them a bit of uniformity. The spot under the windows was repaired. We thought we fixed the water issue, but apparently we have not found the true source because the new plaster is effervescing there, just where the plywood was damp and damaged. Now we think it may be the flashing on the roof to the dining room window bump-out. Once we get that taken care of, we can repair the plaster and repaint the area. We were in the midst of cleaning when these pictures were taken, so the curtains were down for washing and the area rug was rolled up to clean the floor. It doesn’t really show in these pictures, but the walls are a soft, creamy white, and I have future intentions of painting that bitter-apple-green furniture in an antique black shade. I just love the high contrast between light and dark.
Sir-not-appearing in these photos: the spot where I am currently sitting. The computer table. I doubt I will ever photograph the mess that is the computer table, much less post it on the web for all to see, so just forget about it!

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House Tour: Side Bedroom Before

Christine

Well, I guess most of the trouble with this room was merely cosmetic.

The chestnut trim in this room received its first coat of paint in the 70s- purple. Yup. I’ve spoken with two grown-up ladies who lived in this house as teenagers during that time, in fact their mother was the first to paint the woodwork, and they told me that this had been their room. So when their mom was in her painting frenzy, the girls got a purple bedroom. Well, purple and white are our school colors, you know. In fact, my aunts are about the same age, and they also shared a purple bedroom. Go figure.I’d say, aside from the ugly ceiling fan, hideous curtains, and the bad stenciling, this room was in fairly decent shape. Oh, yeah. Except for under the windows. You see that strip of paint off the wall under the left window? Well, that paint has peel off, not off of plaster, as you might expect, but off of plywood. Yes. Plywood. Painted to blend with the rest of the room. Hardly noticeable. Only trouble is, hmm… why is there plywood under the windows? Could it be… a water problem? Ding, ding, ding! That’s right! A water problem. Now, P.O.s, why would you address the cause of the water problem, when you can just cover it over? Why go to the added expense? I’ll bet you already had that hunk of plywood lying around, too, didn’t you? Idiots.
And that little Wal-Mart gem of a carpet should look just fine in the basement someday. Nice generous closet here, too. This one seems to be a bit bigger than the others, and has a bit more headroom, therefore, Lewis claimed this one for his own.

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House Tour: Front Bedroom After

Christine

Now here we are, in September of 2008, five years after I bought the house. I need to make tiebacks for the curtains, which are a beautiful shimmery dress fabric, it has this 1940s deco look to it, and just has the loveliest drape. I bought these way back when I worked at Penney’s, and I have them in several colors. I just loved the fabric so much, I snagged them when they went on clearance, packed them away in a bin, and hoped I would have a place to use them someday. It is kind of funny, really. I think I always knew I wanted a house that had multiple windows per room. And this house sure does!
I still need to stain the curtain rod (a someday project), which is pieced together with parts from different places. I snagged the eight-foot pole from the clearance bin at Linens-n-Things. I chose the brackets from Country Curtains because they have a second notch behind the big one, in case I ever want to hang a second layer. And I ordered the pineapple finials from VanDyke’s. They are a pretty close match to the finial on the four-post bed.All of this beautiful furniture came from my Grandma Millie’s house. It is mahogany with a dark finish, and while they are not antiques, they are old. She got most of her furniture in the 40s, when she got married. I think my grandparents must have gone to the store and kitted out the living room, dining room, and bedroom all at once. The pieces are almost interchangeable, all the same wood and color, with similar styling. It certainly makes it easy to move things around. I intend to stick with the dark wood furniture, as you may have noticed from the recent yard sale buying frenzy.
Oliver makes himself comfortable in my bed, but when we get tired of each other, he often settles in his comfy chair by the window.

You may have noticed the elephant theme. You see, while I’m not too wild about the Early American Colonial style, and this furniture is undoubtedly Colonial Revival. Reproductions. I’m trying to give it a little twist, going for a British Colonial feel. Think British India. Hence the elephants. Yeah. It still needs some work.
As for the room itself, the floors refinished beautifully, with few repairs needed, and the chestnut trim was cleaned and hydrated with Formby’s Deep Cleansing Build-Up Remover, followed by Formby’s Lemon Oil Treatment, which I use on all my furniture. Never Pledge, which causes a cloudy build up. Yuck. Always the Formby’s products.